Don’t Go to Founders School

August 2026

Founder’s School is a four-year, entrepreneurship-focused high school powered by Alpha School’s learning software, which uses AI to compress core academics into a three hour timeline. Students spend the remainder of the day building their own business, attending bootcamps to upskill themselves with disciplines chosen from a “menu” of potential competencies (think: UGC, design, vibe coding, etc). Students are guaranteed a million dollars in profit by graduation, or their tuition is refunded.

The creation of economic value seems to be a good benchmark for applied learning. After all, the market is rarely incorrect. The ability to create and capture value is arguably the only quantitative test of first-principles understanding and application of a skillset. Founders School emphasizes the creation of economic value and nobly assists in its pursuit.

Where does this go wrong? Well, value can be created in many ways. My opinion is that there are certain ways of creating value that are clearly superior to others. Some are sustainable and fulfilling, and some…not so much. The world probably does not need more dropshippers and e-commerce gurus. If you are optimistic about the future of abundance like I am, this is especially damning. In a post-scarcity world, you will not care that you made a million dollars in high school. Money buys survival, not fulfillment. Schools need to prepare children to lead a fulfilled future. I’m of the opinion that people can be fulfilled in many ways, but the most ambitious people I’ve met derive enjoyment and satisfaction from, among other things, working through difficult problems. And worst of all: the parents of all the kids that can afford this school are all at least decamillionaires — survival is already solved!

If a student has a passion for a field that is even moderately technical, moderately capital intensive, they are told off immediately. What a grotesque incentive structure! Just because a student cannot start a revenue-generating biotechnology company as a 14 year old does not mean that the same student isn’t capable of creating a trillion dollar one given the right educational foundation. Founders School’s compounding failure is that they are optimizing for a fragile metric over a short time horizon. Lengthen the time horizon for most students and you’ll find that the best way to set them up for success is to allow them to pursue their interests.

The bottom line is that the incentive structure of Founders School encourages gamey businesses that are revenue-optimized, but the structure self-admittedly alienates students interested in deep technology, research, and basically any career built from a serious discipline.

Let’s hypothetically agree with the premise of Founders School that entrepreneurship is the most valuable skillset in the world. Entrepreneurs solve problems. An entrepreneur, thus, is rate-limited by the variety of problems that they are interested in and capable of solving. In this entrepreneurship-forward vision of good, the purpose of education should be broadening the interest and capacity of entrepreneurs to solve problems. The skills of business are a necessary but insufficient condition for abundance. It seems much easier for a chip-maker, biologist, or material scientist to learn how to run a company than for an MBA to build chips, design drugs, or discover new materials. And, of course, how would the businessperson know that these problems exist, are important, and have the skills to work through them if they’d never been exposed to genuinely difficult problems through their education?

The pedagogy of Founders School wrongly assumes that entrepreneurship is in of itself the most valuable skill in the world. Founders school is ultimately just substituting one shitty incentive structure for another: one dumb game of college admission for another dumb game of money. This is not how we fix education.

last modified August 17th, 2026